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Xbox is a third party publisher and not a console maker any more – Reader’s Feature


This is an Xbox advert

This is not a very good marketing campaign (Microsoft)

A reader is unimpressed by Microsoft’s new ‘This is an Xbox’ marketing campaign and insists that Xbox has already gone third party.

As a company, Microsoft is worth over $3 trillion and yet for some reason they have always had terrible marketing. Maybe they’re so rich because they don’t like spending money, including on talented staff, but that seems bizarre to me. So if you’re wondering why Xbox always has such bad marketing (if it has any at all) it’s not actually specific to them, it’s the whole company.

I say this, you’ve probably already guessed, because this latest marketing campaign for ‘This is an Xbox’ is just mindboggling bad. It blows past ‘I could do better than this’ and right through to ‘Anyone could have done better this,’ to the point where you begin to wonder whether Sony paid for the ads and Xbox doesn’t actually realise they’ve gone up everywhere.

The gist is, if you haven’t seen them (I assume GC will put some pics up here), that they’re showing off that you don’t need to own an Xbox console in order to play Xbox games, as you can use a PC, mobile device, or a smart TV. This is despite the fact that the Xbox cloud streaming service is still only in beta and, in my experience, is not very good – certainly not as good as GeForce Now.

There’s no need to ask why they’re advertising all this right now because the answer is obvious: because Xbox console sales are in the toilet and it’s the only thing they can do. Except they’re doing it really badly. I mean, the main poster is a picture of a TV, with dotted lines around it and the phrase ‘This is also an Xbox, by itself.’ That’s a hilariously clumsy sentence that only highlights how weird and confusing the whole campaign is.

But beyond just the bad taglines the whole thing doesn’t make any sense. Nobody’s going to see these ads and suddenly sign up to Game Pass (and buy a controller) for their smart TV. Most casual and non-gamers aren’t going to have a clue what the adverts are even on about, especially as they don’t include any obvious mention of Game Pass.

If you do know what it means though the message is clear: you don’t need to buy an Xbox console, you can just play the same games on other devices and save your £500. If you really know your stuff, you’ll also realise that this includes PlayStation 5 (I’m fascinated to see if ads for Indiana Jones And The Great Circle will include mention of it also coming to PlayStation).

This all happened this week, at the same time that Xbox insisted it was making a next gen console and a handheld (I’m still not clear if they’re one and the same thing), while saying there’s no redlines about what games can be multiformat, i.e. …read more

Source:: Metro

      

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